One function of an operations center such as a network operations center is to report and/or manage network disruptions. Network management applications automate the reporting and/or management process to some extent. A common reporting methodology is to report link, node and application variations based on a threshold level. Furthermore, the performance reporting can be automatically directed to individuals or organizations via pager, email or other means. In one example, if the network is a data communications network, the reporting may be terms of network performance. Thus, the reports would indicate if a particular module or application is operative or inoperative, is operating above or below its operations capacity and/or is not responding. Network operations personnel are most comfortable reporting network disruptions in terms of this type of network impact.
Network impact information may or may not be helpful to network users in determining the impact a network disruption has on a particular operation or task. Network users may be operators or operational service providers who may control daily operations, serve application content, make payroll, etc. When a network disruption is reported, it is desirable for users to get an assessment of impact to operational and support processes. For example, users may want to know how does a router outage affect the ability to control a satellite, access web application content, to deliver payroll, etc. Thus, it is desirable to get reports of network disruption and/or analysis in terms of impact on a mission or task.
Using conventional systems, once a disruption becomes symptomatic, network operations personnel manually translate network performance data into mission dependencies and then mission impact information that can be relayed up the network user's chain. However, this process can be inefficient and impracticable. The network operations center usually will not know all of the operational and support missions that depend on any particular link or node that is disrupted. So unless the disruption happens to turn off a critical user process and that user manually notifies the network operations center, they can only report the disruption in network terms. Problems with a redundancy link or node often go unnoticed or unreported. The interdependence of multiple user processes and the innate interdependence of modern networks make complete assessments very difficult. Gathering, translating, correlating and formatting assessments is very time consuming and is often not timely enough to enable effective mitigation procedures.
Moreover, conventional network management applications typically do not automatically report network problems directly in mission impact terminology. Many of these application are unable to handle the complex intricacies of today's networks and/or systems.